1Speakup project home: http://www.linux-speakup.org 2 3Mailing List: speakup@braille.uwo.ca 4 5Speakup is a kernel based screen review package for the linux operating 6system. It allows blind users to interact with applications on the 7linux console by means of synthetic speech. 8 9Currently, speakup has several issues we know of. 10 11The first issue has to do with the way speakup communicates with serial 12ports. Currently, we communicate directly with the hardware 13ports. This however conflicts with the standard serial port drivers, 14which poses various problems. This is also not working for modern hardware 15such as PCI-based serial ports. Also, there is not a way we can 16communicate with USB devices. The current serial port handling code is 17in serialio.c in this directory. 18 19Some places are currently using in_atomic() because speakup functions 20are called in various contexts, and a couple of things can't happen 21in these cases. Pushing work to some worker thread would probably help, 22as was already done for the serial port driving part. 23 24There is a duplication of the selection functions in selections.c. These 25functions should get exported from drivers/char/selection.c (clear_selection 26notably) and used from there instead. 27 28The kobjects may have to move to a more proper place in /sys. The 29discussion on lkml resulted to putting speech synthesizers in the 30"speech" class, and the speakup screen reader itself into 31/sys/class/vtconsole/vtcon0/speakup, the nasty path being handled by 32userland tools. 33 34Another issue seems to only happen on SMP systems. It seems 35that text in the output buffer gets garbled because a lock is not set. 36This bug happens regularly, but no one has been able to find a situation 37which produces it consistently. 38 39Patches, suggestions, corrections, etc, are definitely welcome. 40 41We prefer that you contact us on the mailing list; however, if you do 42not want to subscribe to a mailing list, send your email to all of the 43following: 44 45w.d.hubbs@gmail.com, chris@the-brannons.com, kirk@braille.uwo.ca and 46samuel.thibault@ens-lyon.org. 47 48